Ramblings of a Flash game programmer

Archive for the ‘android’ Category

After many months of hard work by the team at Electrotank, I’m pleased to say that ElectroServer 5 (ES5) is out the door and ready to power tons of new multiplayer games and MMOs! It is available now for download and comes with a free 25 concurrent user license (with no other restrictions). In addition to the great new features with the 5.0 release, we have a ton of additional features that we’ll be adding and releasing over time.

Over ElectroServer’s 8+ year life it has primarily been used for Flash applications. We’ve now introduced APIs across several languages keeping them as similar as possible. You can now have players play against each other across a multitude of platforms. The supported languages and platforms are,

AS2 and AS3 – Flash, AIR

C# – Unity3D, .Net, and XNA

Objective-C – iOS

Java – for any Java enabled client

UDP

For the fastest and most light weight message transfer, ElectroServer 5 provides the option for UDP messaging. UDP is needed for first-person shooters and racing games.

Message encryption is just one extremely effective means in which ES5 secures client-server communications. ES5 also supports cryptographically hashing passwords used to log onto the system.

Full-featured Sleek Admin

ElectroServer’s admin tool has been completely revamped to be more user-friendly (and attractive!). With it you can configure every aspect of the server. In addition, there are new reporting features built right in. You can view and configure graphs showing up-time, bandwidth usage, CPU usage, and more. There is also the ability to browse snapshots of the server to inspect which rooms exists and who is in them.

Extensive Documentation & Tons of Examples

We invested a lot of time in creating thorough documentation for every server feature. There are tutorials and more than 30 examples! ES5 also comes with a handful of complete multiplayer games.

Screenshot of ES5 game example

Screenshot of Es5 game example

I hope to post more on ES5 and multiplayer game development in the near future.

Adobe invited me to participate in the prerelease programs for Flash CS5 and AIR for Android. I took some time and built a game for the iPhone called Fruit Smash Organic which is currently in the iTunes app store. While I love my iPhone, Apple sure does make you jump through some ridiculous hoops to get an app on it. Even if it is your own testing device! The biggest frustration I had was with just getting my game onto the device.

With the latest crApple news it was time to get my hands on an Android device. My Nexus One arrived yesterday (FedEx Saturday delivery FTW) about 4pm, and I had Fruit Smash Organic ported to the device and running beautifully by 7pm! That includes downloading and installing the SDKs, walking through a Hello World tutorial, charging the device for a little while, and making some minor code edits. Kudos to Adobe and Google for making the process easy instead of a nightmare.

Also, the game performance is great! It doesn’t even think about dropping below full frame rate, and easily out performs the same app running on the iPhone. I look forward to creating more games for Android using Flash!

Short 45 second video showing primary game play.

A slightly longer video showing primary game play and some secondary elements. And you can see the reflection of my and my flipcam 🙂